The Dissolve was my favorite film site, and most important resource for news and opinions. Check it in the morning for today’s reviews (always well written and nearly-always giving a good indication whether I’ll like the film in question) and movie news. Check in the late afternoon for a news update, feature articles (if time to read them), and links to important film writing elsewhere on the internet. All of this was cleanly and appealingly laid-out, and chronologically ordered so I can instantly tell where I left off last time.

There seems to be no single replacement, and I need one – in the aftermath of Dissolve shutting down, I didn’t know a new Tarsem Singh movie had opened, couldn’t tell you whether Minions was any good, and almost missed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Max Fury Road. Until a benevolent billionaire re-funds the site, I’m reading this sprawl of daily sources instead:

– Fandor Keyframe Daily for less-frequent links to good articles elsewhere, and the best film festival aggregate coverage.

– Letterboxd activity feed (feat. most of the ex-Dissolvers)

– Shadowplay for the best film writing in the business.

– Screencrush, but only Matt Singer’s articles (because I cannot bear to see things like “10 Facts you might not know about Ant-Man” in my news).

– Criticwire, but not the rest of Indiewire (because they had a series of oscar-prediction articles in August). In case I ever reconsider, here are actual headlines from a recent day’s Indiewire front page: “[some trailer] Will Take Your Breath Away,” “[another trailer] Will Break Your Heart],” “[another trailer] Will Send You Into A Vicious Fit.” They also wrote a review of a banner ad.

Occasionally twitter is useful, and AV Club‘s okay. Still avoiding video content and podcasts because who has time for those? And I’ve got a pile of sites to check weekly, and others to check monthly/occasionally, not worth replicating here since they change often and since nobody is reading this. And there’s always my treasured Cinema Scope paper subscription (thinking about adding Cineaste and/or Film Comment).

 
What else is going on?

 
– The BBC polled “62 international film critics” to make a top-hundred list of American films, which is mostly more of the same so I don’t feel like tracking it too closely. The eight I haven’t (fully) seen: Imitation of Life, Birth of a Nation, Marnie, A Place in the Sun, The Shop Around The Corner, The Right Stuff, The Shanghai Gesture, Heaven’s Gate. Little White Lies list of 100 Great Movies by Female Directors looks more exciting. Also found some best-animation and best-horror and best-chinese lists, and there’s still the Criterion collection, and recommendations from my books and magazines and the Anthology Film Archives list and the Sight & Sound poll and Cahiers lists and all the new movies coming out daily.

 
– Auteur Completism Update: In October 2005, I finished watching all the Sam Fuller movies I was able to find (later found and watched four more, and rewatched a bunch in improved DVD and bluray copies), then decided to tackle Fritz Lang movies next. In March 2007, I finished watching all the Fritz Lang movies I was able to find (later found and watched four more), and had since added Rivette, Resnais, Marker and Bunuel to the auteur-completism stack.

That was over eight years ago! I’ve continued to add new directors: Bresson, Chaplin, Sternberg, Polanski, Fellini, Bergman, not to mention keeping up with old favorite directors and discovering new ones all the time. Lately I’m always starting film-watching projects and never finishing any, making a hundred must-watch lists (see above) and trying to make gradual progress on them all at once. I miss the sense of accomplishment, saying “there, I’ve seen ALL the Lang movies I can find – here are my faves, here are the ones I need to rewatch on bluray” or whatever. So back to that 2007 list: I’ve averaged one Bunuel per year since then, still missing five (sort of) Resnais, one or two Rivettes (plus the extended Joan the Maid), and it’s hard to tell how many Markers are available these days – they’ve been steadily surfacing on video. Either way, I could reasonably watch the remainder of these by the end of 2015 – and there’s another big list I’m almost through, assuming I can find the energy to watch Shoah sometime.

 
– I’m building a list of movie write-up traps – here are three:

1. “It’s good, but flawed” (pref. with no elaboration on “flawed”).

2. “This movie from the past/present could never be made in the present/past because these/those days movies are/were like ____.”

3. Any mention of “explosions and car chases” re: a movie that lacks these things.

 
– An Adrian Martin phrase I liked very much:
“harnessing our hard drives as our outsourced memory banks”

 
– Since it has become sport to ask me how many movies I watch per year, I’ve accessed my outsourced memory banks to come up with an answer: 238, on average.

Number of movies watched per year:

Before the movie journal, Deeper Into Movies was set up to host movie lists (and some pictures of my birds), tracking all the movies I’ve watched (that I could recall – probably still missing bunches of Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry shorts) and all the ones I’d like to watch. Soon I realized that I was forgetting entire movies I claimed to have seen, partly because I was moving on to the next thing without spending enough time reflecting on the previous one, so the movie blog was born. And sometime between the new year and today, it’s reached a milestone: I’ve written journal entries on more than half the movies I’ve ever seen!

Time for year-end lists! I seem to do this differently every year. This year I wasn’t able to get to the theater as often, but tried to keep up with some movies from the last five years at home, so I put those in their own category.

Favorite New Movies of 2013

Favorite Recent Movies watched on video in 2013

Favorite Older Movies watched on video in 2013

Favorite Shorts watched in 2013

Some 2013 Movies To Watch

I’ve got a new way of tracking various must-see movie lists.
Some of the ones I made (minor) progress on this year:
– They Shoot Pictures: seen 67%
– TSP 21st Century: 81%
– Jonathan Rosenbaum: 55%
– Criterion: 60%
– Time Out Horror: 79%
– Anthology Film Archives: 41%

This is about the 1850th post on the ol’ blog, now covering some 2780 titles (including shorts). Been running a month or two behind lately, hence these lists appearing halfway into January.

Criticwire posted a great roundup of their favorite film criticism of the year. The only one I’d already read was Lili Loofbourow on Brave. I’m missing all the good articles on new films because they’re published when the movie opens then forgotten when I get around to seeing it a month later – need to start bookmarking interesting-looking articles and catching up on weekly sites. Then again, I have a job, and can’t be reading every article on the internet, so maybe the end-of-year roundup is where I’ll leave it.

Sheila O’Malley on Once Upon a Time in Anatolia:
She opens with a phrase I’ve never liked, calling Anatolia “the main character in the film,” but then she actually backs that up with great evidence, giving the film new dimensions.

Glenn Kenny on Cosmopolis: “the story of watching the end of the world from inside your clean room of a limo while you’re also causing that end. … [Cronenberg] examines irrationality with the unflinching precision of a diamond cutter, and the results are as hilarious as they are shocking.”

I liked The Master alright but dismissed its #1 placement on all the year-end lists because its story never seemed to end up anywhere, but now I’m reconsidering its value after reading this in the AV Club: “Phoenix’s performance calls to mind James Dean and the other Method actors who transformed the tone of movies in the ’50s. The era The Master covers, from roughly 1945 to 1952, was a tumultuous one in American culture. It was the age of film noir and psychological realism, but also a time when the suburban placidity for which the ’50s is remembered took root. All of that looms in Anderson’s movie, which deals with human impulses that run counter to the clean, composed America the corporate PR machine was selling.”

The next day I read Kent Jones’ The Master review in Film Comment, where he expands on this idea significantly.

With There Will Be Blood, he unveiled a genuine and immersive fascination with American history: every detail and choice resulted from a dogged pursuit of what it felt like to live in a lonely world of earth, stone, wood, and metal. Anderson drops us into times and places with their own rules and social structures, which we are invited to puzzle out, imparted through a careful deployment of settings, physical stances, and vocal timbres. In The Master, we are plummeted into the humming world of mid-century urban America, with its top-down organization of class, its smoothly managed department stores and amateur musicales in turn-of-the century mansions, its intimations of orgiastic abandon behind closed doors, its peculiar notions of the unconventional. It’s a moment at which the lowly sociopath and the genteel society matron are both in search of a liberator, who may or may not have arrived in the form of “theoretical philosopher” desperate to gain a foothold in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Matt Singer wrote an article about film franchises using The Simpsons’ Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show as a framework, hilarious.

David Cairns on The Hobbit:
“Maybe Jackson should have shot at 24 and projected at 48, thereby making the film half as long?”

from patheos.com on Holy Motors:
“It makes you wonder if the green-screen work for Avatar might be more compelling than the final animated production.”

Cairns again:
“I’m told that McKellen had to act his scene at the dinner table with a bunch of paper cut-out heads on sticks, with light bulbs that flashed on to signal when each character was speaking so he could look in the right direction. I would, on the whole, far rather see that version of the scene.”

Of course his Shadowplay blog and David Hudson’s Keyframe Daily are currently the only film sites I read daily, following links from within when needed. I’ve come up with a list of ten more to check weekly – we’ll see how long that lasts.

Things I didn’t read: what anyone thought of the new Batman movie or the Sight & Sound list, any conversations on whether movies/film/digital are dead or dying. But despite its “film is dead”-sounding title, I greatly enjoyed Dave Kehr’s book of movie reviews, When Movies Mattered, and I’m currently enjoying J. Hoberman’s slightly more optimistically-titled Film After Film.

Celebrate!

Over 1400 features now on the blog, plus a bunch of shorts round-ups, TV shows and miscellaneous. And posts like these, cluttering things up.

I guess I’ve usually tallied my different list-watching goals on past anniversaries, but I just did that in December, so let’s skip it. Currently 7500 titles on the ol’ must-watch list. That’s two decades’ worth of movies if I watch one daily. Something to look forward to!

What’s new? Been watching more television lately (collected here) since finishing The Wire. Also been rewatching The Wire, for that matter. Also working behind the scenes on the database and of course more lists. More on that when it’s finished. I downloaded some “themes” to change the stale look of the blog (not to mention the messed-up next/previous-page links at the bottom) but haven’t gotten around to implementing those yet.

Latest statistics:
I think I account for some 20% of my own traffic. Don’t know why my google image search traffic is way down – maybe it’s something I did last year, since I was almost going over my bandwidth limit from people leeching my horror movie screenshots. Most popular posts at the moment are My Night at Maud’s and Metropolis. Most hits come from Google, where some of the most popular searches include “human centipede” (get over that stupid movie, everybody), “vic morrow death photos” (I don’t have any), “fanny ardant nude” (don’t have any of these either, but if you send some I will post them), “begotten movie” (even though I’ve never posted on it), “lee van cleef finger” (huh?), “girls with sideburns”, and “fucked up freaked out bird”.

Best of the Blog (or at least some posts that I enjoyed writing and/or researching):
Super 8 vs. Contagion
The Turin Horse
Too Early, Too Late
Even Dwarfs Started Small
Intolerance
L’Amour Fou
Tourneur Triple-Feature
People On Sunday
Stromboli
Road to Nowhere (only because I got a comment from the film’s writer)
City of Pirates
Manuel on the Island of Wonders
Class Relations
Deep Red
La Prisonierre
Finisterrae
Le Pont du Nord

Another good movie year. Lists to follow.

Progress on my massive must-see lists: I’ve now watched some 61% of the They Shoot Pictures list (up from 55 last year), approx. 50% of Rosenbaum’s list (46 last year), and about 57% of Criterion movies (was 54 and I watched a ton, but they just keep releasing ’em).

Normally I have a long list I’d made myself a year before of specific movies I intended to watch this year, and I can disappointedly point out how few of them I ended up watching, but I didn’t do that this year, so no disappointment!

Movies I only watched in part:
Late Spring – will surely try this again
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – we’ll pick this up again, too
Uncle Meat – meant to watch a half hour at a time, but never returned.
The Prisoner – meant to watch on treadmill, but working out is hard
Bells of St. Mary’s – still plotting to finish, but I fell asleep a half hour before Katy turned it off, so our resume-points are out of sync.
A Christmas Carol – The Jim Carrey motion-capture version. Not planning to finish this ever, since its one of the worst movies we’ve ever (half) watched – a mishmash of visual styles, all of them ugly.

Anyway… on with the lists!

It’s my thousandth post! Coming up on the four-year anniversary of my movie blog – I celebrated the first and second but missed the third – time to take stock of things.

62% of my web traffic comes from Google image search and 99.9% of my comments are from spammers (much thanks to the Defensio plugin for auto-deleting those). So not a lot of regular readers. But let’s face it, if this wasn’t my own blog I wouldn’t read it either. I guess I will never be a famous film writer, damn it all.

Almost half the movies covered here are from the last decade (that percentage will only increase in the next 11 months, what with my best-of-decade project currently in progress).

Included in the 1690 titles (including shorts):
8 by Takashi Miike, Sam Fuller, Charles Burnett, Pedro Almodovar, Howard Hawks, Peter Watkins
9 by Fritz Lang
10 by Stuart Gordon, Brian De Palma
11 by Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog
12 by Joe Dante, Eric Rohmer
13 by David Lynch, Guy Maddin
16 by Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, Buster Keaton
25 by Chris Marker

Taking stock of big movie-list quests:
The IMDB changed their search so I can’t simply list the top-250 films I haven’t seen, and it doesn’t seem worth counting by hand. Wasn’t such an interesting list, anyway. I’m around 427/1000 (up from 380 in 2009) on Rosenbaum’s list (with 65% of his top 100), 554/1000 (up from 500) on the They Shoot Pictures list (helped significantly by a site update which replaced some more obscure titles with popular ones), 266/515 (52%, up from 47%) on the Criterion list and a piddling 10/95 (13%) on the Eclipse list. Those should continue to keep me busy for a good while.

It continues to give me pleasure to watch my little movies, write these little posts, and track them in my fancy, sortable index. Carry on, then.

Wow, I wrote too much last year so I’ll keep this short. How am I doing on my ongoing quest to see every great movie?

– My 2008 goal to watch movies I already had (mainly purchased, never-watched DVDs but also rented/copied DVDs and downloads) was not a complete success, somewhere around a third complete. I’m allowing myself to start buying DVDs again with the condition that I watch at least one off the shelf for each new one I acquire… seems reasonable.

– Filmmaker-oriented goals, to see all the movies by Rivette, Resnais, Marker, Bunuel, were well explored and advanced in 2008, but are on hold now, since I’ve decided to ban all foreign-language films (except theatrically and in certain other cases) until I’m at least halfway through my long-long-delayed French lessons.

– Made my list of movies I definitely have to watch in 2009, but I overdid it as always, so it’s 270 titles long. Still, unrealistic goals are better than no goals at all.

– And of the best-movies-ever lists that I often refer to, I’m up five to 211/250 on the IMDB list (will never hit 100% as long as Crash 2004 is still on there), up fifty to 500/1000 on the They Shoot Pictures list, up forty to 380/1000 on the Rosenbaum list, up a mere five on the 1977 list, and up one percent (242/519 from 205/450) on the Criterion/Eclipse list (the hardest one to keep up with).

There are other new years goals and resolutions and lists and everything, but they ain’t movie-related so they are of no concern here.